


Night Terror

by RetroactiveCon



Series: Four Times Trouble [11]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Antisemitism, Earth-X (CW DC TV Universe), Homophobia, M/M, Memories of Concentration Camps, Nightmares, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:41:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25694428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RetroactiveCon/pseuds/RetroactiveCon
Summary: He finds Ray out on the fire escape, sucking in deep breaths of early-morning air. The city below them is twinkling with light, the sky above just beginning to shade toward predawn grey. Barry thinks it’s beautiful. It’s also the prime time for nightmares.“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks eventually.Ray scoffs. “How can I?”
Relationships: Barry Allen/Leonard Snart/Earth-X Leonard "Leo" Snart/Ray Terrill, Barry Allen/Ray Terrill, Leonard Snart & Earth-X Leonard "Leo" Snart
Series: Four Times Trouble [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706920
Comments: 12
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SophiaCatherine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/gifts).



> SophiaCatherine asked for more of Ray and Leo's side of the relationship - I doubt this is quite what you'd had in mind, Soph, but it felt like Ray needed a chance to voice some of his trauma, especially given how quickly everything is moving. 
> 
> With regard to that - this fic has Ray trying to work through the same kinds of things shown in the Crisis on Earth-X episodes, including a brief mention of his time in the concentration camp, and while I'm hoping to do justice to his trauma, the last thing I want is to make light of a very real and terrible occurrence, so I will absolutely take this fic down if asked.

Barry is awake—not for any particular reason, just too much energy—when there’s a soft sob from beside him. He props himself up on his elbow and reaches out, expecting to encounter Ray’s mound of blankets. “Ray?”

Ray sits up with a gasp. Before Barry can ask what’s the matter, he wriggles out of his blanket cocoon, climbs carefully over the still-sleeping Leo, and bolts out of the room. 

Barry gives him exactly two minutes before following him out. He finds Ray out on the fire escape, sucking in deep breaths of early-morning air. The city below them is twinkling with light, the sky above just beginning to shade toward predawn grey. Barry thinks it’s beautiful. It’s also the prime time for nightmares. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks eventually. 

Ray scoffs. “How can I?” 

Barry joins him. The fire escape isn’t really a perch for two, but they make it work. Barry leans close enough to share his speedster warmth, figuring Ray probably needs it in the early-morning chill. “You dreamed you were back there.”

Ray wraps his arms tightly around himself. “I think everyone from that hellish world has nightmares,” he confesses. “Well. The people who benefited, don’t imagine they do. But the resistance? The ones like me, the ones who were caught?” He makes a soft, frustrated sound. “I know Leo does, but who do we have to tell except each other?”

“Len,” Barry volunteers. Len might be wary of opening up to them, but he wouldn’t deny either of them if they needed to talk. “Me.”

Ray makes a soft, disbelieving sound. “You’re sweet, Barry, and you’re mindful of us, but there are things…things we both still need to process, things you, thank God, know nothing about. Things people on this Earth have done their best to forget, those who can.” 

Barry tilts his head. He remembers the fear of being marched to that trench with Ray and the others, the feeling that they were going to die helpless and alone in a world that wasn't theirs, but Ray has told him nothing about what he endured prior to that. “I know…enough, I think, to help, just from learning about what happened on this Earth?” he offers. “Or I could read up—there are books, documents, people really don’t want the world to forget. I can learn, for the two of you.”

Ray shakes his head. His eyes are distant. “I thought so too, that knowing what I’d be stepping into would make it easier somehow. But, God.” Barry has the fleeting thought that Ray wouldn’t blaspheme if Leo was awake, then feels guilty for it. “Knowing where the pink triangle came from didn’t prepare me to wear it. Knowing about the conditions in Nazi-occupied countries didn’t prepare me to have to ration food with starving resistance fighters. Books can talk about fear, Barry, but they can’t make you feel what you don’t have the context to understand.” 

“And I dragged you here, away from all the work you need to do to rebuild that world, and I haven’t given you any time to grieve.” Barry’s heart sinks. However inadvertently, he took Leo and Ray away from the work they were doing to heal from the trauma they endured. 

“No.” Ray lays his hand over Barry’s and squeezed. His firm grip feels like he’s clinging as much for his own reassurance as to calm Barry. “This is my home. Earth-X needed me—needed help, anyway, and I sufficed—but it wasn’t my world. It was barely my fight. And my trauma is so much less than people like Leo, who lived with it their entire lives.”

“That doesn’t make it any easier coming back to…” Barry gestures at the city, at their apartment, at the clear sky overhead. “White picket fences and a show of equality and a world that, like you said, has tried to forget trauma that’s only a few months old to you. It might be harder for you, because this was familiar to you once, and now you’ve changed more than your world has. It’s all brand new to Leo. It’s…sort of not, for you, even if some of it is.”

Before Barry knows what’s happening, Ray turns and buries his face in Barry’s shoulder. “I feel caught,” he admits. “More than Leo does, more than he ever will. This world is my home, and you and Len are dear to me, but the man I love most…the cause I fought for…”

“They have your loyalty.” Barry understands. As much as he loves Leo and Ray, he would always put Len first if it came down to a choice between them. If they asked him to go to Earth-X to stay, he would have to decline. It’s cruel of him, he realizes, to ask Leo and Ray to try to acclimate to a home on a world that isn’t theirs and offer so little help with the prolonged rebuilding effort on their Earth.

Ray nods. “And you’ve been understanding of the two of us going back and forth, but it only makes me feel more caught between worlds.” He shifts so he can look out over the city without giving up his comfortable spot on Barry’s shoulder. “It would be hard enough just opening up to you and Len—especially Len—” Barry chuckles ruefully “—but across worlds like this?”

“Do you need to go spend some time on Earth-X?” Barry checks. He doesn’t know what else to offer, but he can’t just let Ray go without offering some kind of compromise.

Ray sighs and cuddles closer to him. “That’s not a decision to make at five in the morning,” he admits. “We’ll need to go back soon—just the way things have to be—but do you mean am I going to go back because of a nightmare?” He shakes his head. “No, or I’d go back every night.”

A shaky voice from inside the apartment says, “Well, if I’d known everyone would be here, I’d have come out sooner.”

“Hey, Leo.” Barry shifts slowly away from Ray and gets to his feet. “Should I leave you two alone to talk?” He checks mostly with Ray, who’ll have the context for the question. 

“If you could?” Ray watches him warily, as though he’s not entirely sure Barry will just leave them be. “This is something we really need to talk through with each other.”

Barry nods and kisses his brow. “Come back to bed when you’re ready,” he murmurs. “I won’t mess up your blanket cocoon.” 

He pauses to kiss Leo on his way in. “I want to make room for you both,” he says, trusting Ray will explain the context. “Whatever you need. However that looks.”

Leo gives him a tearstained smile. “I love you.”

“I love you too—both of you.” Barry casts Ray another long, pensive look before leaving them on the fire escape to talk.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...this chapter is worse. SophiaCatherine prompted me to write what Len and Leo were doing prior to Leo coming out onto the fire escape, and...it turns out he has _a lot_ of terrible things to share with Len. Content warnings for: mentions of concentration camps (in more detail than Ray's nightmare), fire (and canonical character death in said fire), suicidal thoughts (past and, more mildly, present), and homophobia and anti-Semitism (and Nazi actions driven by them).

Len wakes feeling suspiciously cold. No sooner has he registered this than he’s aware of sobbing, low and soft as though muffled into a pillow. “Barry?” he asks in confusion, sitting up. No…Barry is gone. The loss of his distinctive speedster warmth is what left him feeling cold. Ray’s blanket pile is in disarray, and the sobbing is coming from the far side of the pile. He’s been left alone with a sobbing Leo? Oh, this can’t end well. 

The sobbing stops when he speaks. Then, with a little breathless noise, it resumes again. Reluctantly, Len drags himself across the bed, peers over Ray’s blanket pile, and can just make out Leo’s outline in the darkness. 

“Did you have a nightmare?” he asks curtly. 

Leo draws in a teary breath. “I-I’m fine,” he whispers. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“No, it’s…fine.” Tentatively, Len reaches out a hand and rests it against Leo’s shoulder. He seldom calms down from a touch, but his cuddly doppelganger might. “You can tell me.”

“I…” Leo sniffles. “I dreamed about Mickey again.” He shudders and wraps his arms around himself. 

“Mickey…your Mick.” Len knows Leo and his Mickey were together and that Mickey died in a fire, but other than that, Leo hasn’t been particularly forthcoming.

Leo nods and leans across the blanket pile to curl in Len’s arms. Len doesn’t particularly want him to, but it would be too cruel to push him away. “It’s been years since his death—so many years. He didn’t live to see how bad it got. I’m thankful for that every day.”

“He died in a fire,” Len prompts. Unlike him, Leo will just _talk_ —he doesn’t need much in the way of prompting.

Leo sniffles. “The last of the police that we trusted—some of the last public officials in the city standing up to the Nazis, at that point—were barricaded into the station and…and some goon started a fire. Mickey had always been drawn to fire.” He gives a watery little laugh, like Mickey’s fascination with fire was as endearing to him as Mick’s is to Len. “He was the only one who wasn’t afraid to step up and help.” Leo’s voice breaks and he buries his face in Len’s shoulder. 

“How many did he save?” Len asks. He suspects ‘save’ is a relative term.

“All of them,” Leo says, his voice proud and mournful in equal measure. In a broken, watery whisper, he confesses, “I wish he hadn’t. I wish he’d stopped, but I think…I think he knew what would happen if he did.”

“Out of the fire and into more trouble?” Len ventures. It’s callous, but he doesn’t know how else to say it. 

Leo nods and clings to him. “He’d defended me for years, I think he was already a known sympathizer. It was only a matter of having nobody left who would keep people like me, and people like Mickey, out of trouble. Once those officers were…disappeared, they just vanished after the fire…that was when Central City turned hostile.”

Len doesn’t say anything. He wonders, though, how many other worlds have a version of him and a version of Mick whose lives forever changed when they found each other. He's just glad he and his Mick got one of the worlds where they saved each other, rather than getting each other killed. 

“I mourned him for years. I almost got myself killed because of it.” Leo laughs and sniffles. “I wanted to die. Oh, I said I was being useful, said it was a risk worth taking, but…I was trying to get myself killed, and I knew it even then.”

Len blinks. He has no idea what that means, but he has a gut-level feeling that it wasn’t good. “What…did you do?”

Leo lifts his head. In the mostly-dark room, Len can barely make out his weary little smile. It looks too much like the kind of look Len uses to hide pain. “I used to deliberately get myself caught, get taken, to try to incite revolts inside the camps. Resistance fighters would come from the outside at the same time, prearranged, scheduled to the minute, and there would be enough chaos to get people out.”

“That was suicidal,” Len snaps. It’s cruel of him, but he can’t think of anything else to say. “There had to be another way.”

“Of course there was, there were a million other ways.” Leo shudders. “I ran half a dozen successful missions that way—different camps, with months between, trying to avoid being recognized. It didn't really matter toward the end, word got around—I was a known escape risk, my movements were restricted, I was singled out if there was even a whisper of trouble—and I didn’t care. Until the last time.”

Len says nothing. Leo wants to talk, for some bizarre reason. Maybe it’s easier to say these things to a version of himself, even one as hostile as Len. 

“Someone must have said something, about Mickey, about…us.” Leo sighs and swipes tears away. “It was common practice, they wanted to pit people against each other, especially in the queer community—one way or another, they got names, and mine must have come up. The next time I was caught, I was given a different badge—pink and yellow, gay and Jewish. I don’t know if it was this way here, but the pink triangle was…almost a sure death sentence, and add to that being a Jewish man with multiple successful escapes…” He makes a hopeless noise. “I came closer to death that time than ever before, or ever since. General Schott forbade me to get deliberately caught again, and said if I was ever caught for any reason, deliberately or not, that I couldn’t expect help.”

Len feels sick. That was _him._ In another universe, he came that close to death just for who he is—and he almost let it happen. “He really said that?” he whispers, for lack of anything else to say. 

Leo nods sadly. “It’s why I had no backup when I came to rescue Ray. There was an understanding in the resistance, that…helping other captives notwithstanding…if anyone was caught, they were on their own. Had I failed, we both would have died…and all of you with us, which I didn’t know at the time.”

Len glances toward the door. That explains where Barry and Ray are—no doubt Ray is as prone to nightmares as any of them, and of course his empathetic little Scarlet would have to get up and try to help. “It must have felt like atoning for Mickey’s death.”

Leo nods and bites his lip. “In a way. I could save Ray, which was more than I could do for Mickey.” He lets out a watery little sigh. “But I pay for it still, in my dreams every night. So many years, and I still wish…”

“That he’d lived?” Len ventures, although he suspects it’s the wrong thing to say. 

Slowly, Leo shakes his head. “That I’d died too. So many others did…my Mickey did. What did I do to deserve to survive?”

Len scoffs at that, though with much less force than he would have at the beginning of the conversation. “Nothing. You just did. All you can do about that is make sure it never fucking happens again. That’s the only way to do right by the dead.” He thinks about their world, this Earth that’s made Leo so happy, and feels a sudden flare of hatred. “Make sure your world doesn’t forget as quickly as this one did.”

He can feel Leo’s stare better than he can see it. “How could anyone forget?”

“Because it never affected them in the first place.” It’s the best answer Len can offer. Then, because he can’t leave such a hopeless statement lingering in the air, he adds, “For what it’s worth…I get it. Why you did what you did. I didn’t at first.”

Leo squeezes him tight. “It’s worth plenty,” he whispers. Slowly, somewhat shakily, he gets to his feet. "I'm going out to see where Ray is. I needed this, Len, and I won't forget it, but there are some things that are easier for the two of us to talk about."

Len lets him go. It’s not quite dawn and he’s already reached his limit of feelings for the day. He can’t forget this, though, although he suspects Leo thinks he will. There has to be some way to show Leo that it’s not about deserving to survive—it’s about what that survival looks like after the fact. It can’t look like the suicidal missions Leo threw himself into after Mickey. Len isn’t sure what outlets Leo has now that the fight on his Earth is essentially over, and especially now that he spends so much time on Earth-1, but he has to find something. He worries about what his doppelganger might do if he doesn’t, because he knows by now, he would have self-destructed. He can’t let that happen to Leo.


End file.
